Lullabies for Seamus

tinyurl.com/lullabies-for-seamus

1. Model          (tune: G&S's)

You are the very model of a quite complacent pussycat:
Your fur's a tad elongated, your belly is a little fat,
          Your purr is very audible,
          You roll into a body-ball,
You are the very model of a quite complacent pussycat!

You are the mighty hunter in the jungle of the living room;
Your speed can vary sharply from an amble to a lightning zoom;
          Your audacity’s incredible:
          You think MY food is edible,
And stick your mouth between my face and what I have upon my spoon!

You let me pet you gently, then you grab me and you want to fight;
You settle down along my side, and cuddle there all through the night;
          You gaze out at the critters, then
          You get a case of jitters, an’
You run across our bellies, waking both of us with quite a fright!

[repeat first verse]

2. Pretty Kitty          (tune: Coming Round the Mountain)

You're a pretty little kitty, yes you are;
You're a pretty little kitty, yes you are;
          You are such a pretty kitty
          I must sing a little ditty
About what a pretty kitty cat you are:

Your fur is proud and tumble-dried and long;
Your purr is loud and rumble-like and strong;
          It is really not a hassle
          That you have to have a wrassle
Every time I want to sleep or sing a song!

You strop against my legs each time you pass;
You try to fight the “Rocky“s through the glass;
          Your teeth and claws are brambles;
          But when lights turn off, WHO scrambles
Like the demon-dogs of hell were on his ***?

You're a brave and fearless fellow, yes you are;
You're a brave and fearless fellow, yes you are;
          You're a brave and fearless fellow —
          Who could ever call you “yellow”?! —
You're a brave and fearless fellow, yes you are!

Rest in peace, Seamus, facing east. After night comes the dawn....

Perfection vs Growth

tinyurl.com/perfection-vs-growth

“Be ye perfect, even as your Father in Heaven is perfect.” — Matthew 5:48.

With full respect to our elder brother, let me venture another point of view.

This is the life we get to make mistakes in, to bump noses, to misspeak or misinterpret and have to explain, to fall down and pick ourselves back up again, to make utter fools of ourselves now and then, to find we’ve hurt each others’ feelings and apologize and sob our hearts out and forgive and be forgiven. We have a lifetime of perhaps a century or less, even much much less, to practice everything, and get it all wrong at first if we must, and then work around to getting it all right. This is the temporary life, the sandbox. Let’s learn and grow from the experience while we have the precious opportunity!

The next life is the permanent one, where whatever is, lasts forever, and must be exactly, perfectly right — and by then we’ll be perfect by definition, “past perfect” in its most grammatical sense; this life will be over and done with, gone and completed, perfect as in dead. Why rush ahead to the time of no second chances? Why disdain, and discard unused, our one blessèd chance to be imperfect now?

_______________

The late Robert Lynn Asprin, who as “Yang the Nauseating” founded the SCA’s Dark Horde, made part of its philosophy the goal of perfection, an ideal he derived from his martial arts background. He was another “elder brother” I differed with to this extent.

The utopianly pacific martial art Aikido’s founder Morihei Ueshiba (whose side I share here) took a more grounded stance: “Life is growth. If we stop growing, technically and spiritually, we are as good as dead.” — The Art of Peace.  “Never think of yourself as an all-knowing, perfected master,” he advised; on which basis he declined to wear the prestigious mastery belt of his own school.

Daniel Steinbock’s “Perfect Is Dead” discusses “the elusive aesthetic principle of wabi sabi [in Japanese art]... an attitude towards one’s craft that embraces imperfection. ... For wabi sabi practitioners, perfection is just a head trip.... a perfect form is dead. It has no room to grow, move, stretch, or transform, because any change spells a deviation from perfection. Perfection is rigid, stultifying to innovation, end-all-be-all, boring. Imperfect is alive, in flux, starts arguments, and raises questions....”

Consider the saying, “the perfect is the enemy of the good [enough]”. Among other meanings: doing something well may be rendered impossible by striving to do it perfectly. (Striving to do it better, as time and other priorities allow, is another matter. Are deadlines an issue? The perfectionist may not finish.)

Gore’s Saga

tinyurl.com/gore-s-saga

In a thread over on Shakespeare’s Sister in 2006, discussing
just how hard the Democrats should fight the Republicans, Kirby wrote:

“In 2000, I wanted to see a naked and bloody Al Gore
standing on the steps of the White House with Bush’s head on a pike.
So no, nothing Dems do to fight back now would bother me.”

That was such a vivid image that it called up heroic verses in my head.

                    GORE‘S SAGA

Foul was the faring to ford the Potomac;
Wretches had ruined the river‘s pure flow.
Deep was the darkness as desperate heroes
Sought through the city to slay their fell foe.

Drastic the deeds that had drawn them all thither,
Tragic the tale of that terrible time:
Fate had enfeebled the freedom of many,
Parting the people from power by crime.

Once had the wonderful way of the nation
Settled succession by seeking fair test;
Now had the numbers been not truly noted,
Liars had laughed as they libelled the best.

Gore had the greater of groups voting for him,
Only if honesty honored the counts.
Fewer would follow a felon hight Dubya —
His were the henchmen that hid the amounts.

Dark was the day that this Dubya took power,
Woeful the world under wicked men‘s rule:
Terror attacking could topple a tower,
Dubya would do naught but dabble at school.

Past all his prating of pet goats to children,
Courage he could not have claimed and been true.
Fearfully fled he from first sign of danger,
Crept into caverns well covered from view.

Scorned as a shivering, snivelling coward,
Laid he the lie that made loyal men gag:
He was a hero as hearty as any,
Wrapped in a robe of the royal war-flag.

Posing and prancing, this parody-hero
Sped to the sites that his sloth had betrayed,
Spoke of his strength and the speed of his vengeance,
Waved men to war... but then went home and played.

Further this failure would fetter his subjects:
Patriots, pled he, would pledge him their creed.
Bills he embellished to buttress his power;
Sign here, he said, do not seek first to read.

Soon, at his summons, like serfs were his people,
Terror and torture the tools of his trade;
Merely his marking out men made them vanish,
Pass into prisons he privily made.

Far from the field of this fetid corruption,
Loving the land and yet loathing its lord,
Hearing the horrors that had thus befallen,
Gore listens grimly, while grinding his sword.

Long, but no longer, I‘ve left off my vengeance!
Strong, but no stronger, that snaveling’s role!
Weak, but no weaker henceforth, will my party
Pry back the power that prattler stole!

Blows he a blast on his bellicose war-horn,
Trump-call whose tremors would trammel a foe;
Friends, though, it finds, and they fleetly come forward,
Swords, shields, and spears by their sides as they go.

Swift was their sight of the city benighted,
Quiet and quick was their crossing the ford.
Wrathful and ruthless, they wreaked their hard justice,
Few folk could flee from the fierce spear and sword.

Liars there lay with their lips for once truthful,
Cowards and caitiffs lay calmly at last;
Traitorous torturers‘ tools turned against them,
Paying back pain they had plied in the past.

Screams arose, scaring the scabrous still-living,
Panicing pundits and pollsters who’d slept;
Hacks and louts huddled in hideous terror,
Goplin-folk gripped little green balls and wept.

Where’s Rum and Wolf-o‘-wits, where is Gonzales,
Architects ardent of arduous wars?
Seek ye the secrets they sought to hide ever,
Cells they concealed, tighter sealed now than jars.

What of the worst of them, wily Dick Cheney,
Karl the Accursèd, and coarse liar Rush?
Brains they had boasted, and bellies fat-laden;
Stop by the swine-pens and sniff at the mush.

What of the wicked and wastrel man Dubya?
Fear not, my folk, here‘s the finish you‘ll love.
Gore went and got him, and gives us a trophy:
See, there he stands, with his spear held above.

Bare now and bloodied, but bowing to no man,
Proud of his people and pure in his cause,
Bears he the burden above on his spearpoint,
Proof that no prince safely poisons our laws.

Doom that he dreaded found Dubya the Dumbwad:
Hoisted his head was on high-waving spear;
Gutters were glutted with guts of his goplins.
Glory to Gore, all our griefs disappear!

                    © 2006 C.M. Joserlin, “Raven”

[The Suno AI has composed and performed a tune for this song.]

Gaming the System

tinyurl.com/gaming0system

I have been thinking about examples of “gaming the system” — twisting it from general benefit to personal profit at general cost — I’ve seen either on large, very public scales, or in smaller, less publicized contexts (in the late 1970s and the 1980s I saw it being used to change social groups away from mutual-benefit to self-aggrandizement for some at the cost of abusing others, enough times to make the pattern clear — like hornets persuading honeybees they belonged in the hive, long enough to consume it); and about a sort of “system analysis” to anticipate what sorts of systems are more or less likely to BE so gamed… as Frédéric Bastiat so pithily commented in his 1850 pamphlet “The Law”:

See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime. Then abolish this law without delay, for it is not only an evil itself, but also it is a fertile source for further evils because it invites reprisals. If such a law — which may be an isolated case — is not abolished immediately, it will spread, multiply, and develop into a system. … In fact, this has already occurred.

One of the longer-term worst cases I’ve seen is vulture capitalism, whose core concept was apparently taught senior-to-junior by students of Harvard Business School starting last century: join companies, get an influential position [that HBS MBA helps!], loot it, and take a golden parachute away. Some formed entire companies to take control of other businesses and loot them more efficiently; Bain Capital (led by Mitt Romney, who’d taken the joint JD/MBA program at Harvard Law and Business Schools) is one exemplar. (I pause to think of the SF film John Carter, with the roving city of Zodanga looting other cities, gradually killing off Barsoom.) The barbarians are inside the gates, but no shots are being fired, because no-one thinks of it as a war: it’s called “business as usual”. Honeybees now seem more likely to recognize and repel hornets which invade their hives; so many of the bees that could be fooled have already died, their young become hornet-food.

In this light, the Trump-led but lawyer-advised effort to change the 2020 election result by process tricks, like fake electors and having the VP send state results back to red legislatures (which the J6 insurrection was intended to push by intimidation), should be seen as another example of “gaming the system”, using some of its provisions *against* its own overall purpose of letting the people choose their leaders. The 2016 election’s manipulation by Russia, to change the Electoral-College outcome, was yet another such example. We can think back further, to 2000’s Florida debacle and the Bush v. Gore decision; the 1980 October Surprise; Nixon’s 1968 deal with South Vietnam to withdraw from the Paris Peace Accords and discredit LBJ, extending the war at the cost of millions of lives. Zodanga would approve.

I’ve long since lost any tolerance I might have had for system-gaming. We can write computer software to resist backdoor attacks, worms, and viruses — we should write our social, business, & governmental rules and laws with similar care against malevolent manipulations.